Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek
Status: draft
-_(Part 1 of 3)_
-
> _I'll write my way out
> Write everything down, far as I can see
> I'll write my way out
I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).
-My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to [minimize the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to maximize the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions.
Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), concerned an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. My song went—
> Because the world's not girls and guys
> Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night_
-Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is abhorrent. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their views on psychology! Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. I hadn't yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false".
+Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is _abhorrent_. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their views on psychology! (Also, casually wishing death on a woman does not seem particularly pro-feminist?!) Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. I hadn't yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false".
[TODO: Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)]
Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? (Well, maybe two or three.) When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_?
-Is _everyone else_ not supposed to notice? Suppose I transitioned. Suppose I passed. Suppose I caught the worshipful attention of a young man just like me ("a" young man, as if there wouldn't be _dozens_), who privately told me, "I've never met a woman quite like you." What would I be supposed to tell him? ["There's a _reason_ for that"](https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/)?
+Is _everyone else_ not supposed to notice? Suppose I got the magical body transformation (with no brain mods beyond the minimum needed for motor control). Suppose I caught the worshipful attention of a young man just like I used to be ("a" young man, as if there wouldn't be _dozens_), who privately told me, "I've never met a woman quite like you." What would I be supposed to tell him? ["There's a _reason_ for that"](https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/)?
+
+I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality))
-I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
+I can _imagine_ that all the gaps will vanish after the revolution. I can imagine it, but I can no longer _assert it with a straight face_ because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.
I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
As a _first-order approximation_, I do have a sister. I think the family resemblance between us is stronger than with either parent. We're about equally intelligent—OK, she's probably smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) [_g_-loaded](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) and her 1580 (out of 1600) trounces my 2180 (on [the out-of-2400 scale used between 2005 and 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes,_including_a_new_2400-point_score), such that 2180 proportionally scales down to 1453 out of 1600). Our dark hair curls into helices with similar radius. We even have similar mannerisms, I think? She's 5′6½″.
-But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare resumés and representative work-samples of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my dropout–autodidact's passion culminating in this _batshit insane_ secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of science and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.
+But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare resumés and representative work-samples of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my dropout–autodidact's passion culminating in this _batshit insane_ secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of language and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.
-Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to [sight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_(device)) against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).
+Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to sight against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).
(All this is in accordance with ["Everything is a vector space" philosophy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) implied by this blog's [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain)—if it turns out that something _isn't_ a vector space, I'm not sure I want to know about it. I can hope that my description of the _methodology_ is valuable, even if your brain's pattern-matching faculties can't follow along with the same example, because you haven't met my sister and only know the aspects of me that shine through to the blog.)
Still, the macaque–rasin anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction." Or _something like that_.
-One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf) (ETLE)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
+One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of _being_ women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
-Once I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general ETLE hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
+Recently I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
-And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for me the thing going on with me being an underlying ETLE-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
+And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for me the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
I don't _know_ the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to _be_, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's [one of those sensitive bookish males](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
(As Yudkowsky [occasionally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not _become true of him_ because he believed it.)
-What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because different theories that purport to explain the same facts can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.
+What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because [different theories that purport to explain the same facts](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.
If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and _staying_ on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is designed to "run on" estrogen. But if my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are fundamentally a misinterpretation of misdirected _male_ sexuality, then it's not clear that I _want_ the psychological effects of HRT: if there were some unnatural way to give me a female body (or just more female-_like_) _without_ messing with my internal neurochemistry, that would actually be _desireable_.
-----
-Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
-
-It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
-
-It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights), and everyone I used to trust telling _blatant pants-on-fire lies_ about their _own_ philosophy of language that were clearly optimized to _trick me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off which determines whether or not I should cut my dick off).
-
-But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen, right? Um, to be continued.
+Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird sexual obsession about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
-_([Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for Part 2, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer" (coming someday), and Part 3, "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (coming—someday later))_
+It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them). It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private and sensitive matters—circumstances like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights) But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen ... right?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff